Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

xp thanks for your service noodle

it's ok, I get paid for it

I know people who I went to school with who would openly admit they took the queen's shilling for mayhem/violence/adventure and a higher earning potential, none of this bollocks about making it safer for us civilians.

http://ibdp.huluim.com/show_art/4266?size=900x350

cheers for this lads

the only episode of ultimate force i've seen included a shower scene where some of the male cast openly hung dong, which i thought was either a) weirdly progressive for the most otherwise knuckleheaded action show i've ever seen or b) a surprisingly total capitulation to its bulgingly homoerotic subtext

it feels increasingly incongruous but I'm not sure there's ever been an ebb in very earnest and zealous pro-military sentiment from certain sections since the days of empire. still strong enough, at least when combined with islamophobia, to trump freedom of speech in the luton case

It's not even remotely comparable to the US.

god bless our jingoism-free nation

The British Army, in particular, has never really been that popular in Britain. Strangely enough.

I don't feel that's true - based on my experience of the media in this country in recent years.

That's the media, a bunch of public schoolboys trying to second guess the proles.

There probably a London / not-London split.

I live in a big military area and there's a combination of underlying respect (fundraising for the troops, military participation in local community events, etc) and an awareness that they cause half the drunken, late-night trouble in the wider area.

That's the media, a bunch of public schoolboys trying to second guess the proles.

You think decades of cheerleading from the papers has no effect on a significant number of their readers?

you guys should get out of your metropolitan bubble of fruit juice-sipping quakers and meet some real patriots

The British Army, in particular, has never really been that popular in Britain. Strangely enough.

i'd maybe agree they're the least-popular of the military trinity compared to the raf and the navy, but i've never felt they were anything other than a vital part of the 'our brave boys' continuum in public opinion. they're usually the ones talking with clear-eyed composure about their leg-shearing encounters with ieds and the like in those help for heroes ads / iraq documentaries etc which the great british public love so much

My son has autism and doesn't care much for observing minute's silences at football matches. I love the way it winds up some people if he is stimming and making a racket, some outraged patriot from a few rows back shouted Shut Up during the last one and this teenager who also refused to stand turned around and was grinning at Alex with approval for also not giving a fuck. Sadly though, most people where I sit are very much badge/t-shirt wearing Help For Heroes stans.

yelling 'SHUT UP' during a minute's silence in response to a misperceived slight is a perfect example of a partcular strain of britishness, i think

OUTRAGED Britain

My impatience comes from interacting with narrow minded people from home who are less than tolerant of others, but want a free pass for signing up to kill people.

for a while the whole wootton bassett rolling news thing seemed to be quite a big deal, maybe there needs to be a lot of not-quite children anymore dying meaningless deaths for people to get really excited about the army.

outraged despairing spiteful online-venting britain is the yin to stoic plucky wry superior britain's yang

When I was growing up, the British Army were only occasionally killing Irishmen, that never excited the media too much. Then along cane Galtieri.

hey, that's royal wootton bassett to you son - the name was changed in 2011 in recognition of its role as a military cadaver sorting office xps

Wiltshire is the land of jingoism and forelock-grabbing - I spend Xmas there with a close friend whose Polish ex-POW dad was one of the few socialists in his town.

i apologise if my comments have disrespected royal wooton bassett, the military, the corpses which have travelled through the town, or the loyal subjects who gathered to watch the corpses

When I was at school you joined the Army and, if you were unlucky, got sent to Belfast. How much of a hoohah could you make about that?

aye, it's a much more exciting career now tom - if you're lucky you might get to go to the middle east on a modern-day crusade, and if you are horribly injured there's a decent chance your cutting-edge body armour will keep you alive so you can come home and appear in a help for heroes ad showing off your prosthetics

That's how the Sun editorial team sees it.

When I lived in San Diego I took the bus to UCSD each day, and almost every time there was also veterans taking the bus to the UCSD hospital, many of them on crutches, in wheelchairs. And the respect that they got was wonderful, with many many thank yous and people saying how grateful they was, and nobody ever complaining that the bus was almost always late because it took so long to get their wheelchairs on board, but I kinda kept thinking that perhaps there could be done something more helpful so wounded/disabled veterans wouldn't have to take the bus for an hour on their own to get healthcare?

that sounds suspiciously like socialism *narrows eyes*

fervent troop-supporters tend to support everything to help veterans apart from anything which might negatively impact on their own lives or finances

yeah i don't seem to see the same respect for disabled people in general nor the will to improve the crappy infrastructure that disables them

not technically the west but i've always felt like this should be a "developed nations" drift trend anyway:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437950/japans-new-fascism

(article is old, but i just read it for the first time today)

this is good:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/i-watched-a-populist-leader-rise-in-my-country-and-that-is-why-i-am-genuinely-worried-for-america/2016/12/27/6b4cf632-cc65-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html?utm_term=.fed868c01f85

I remember there being quite a lot of Japanese fascist thinkers I had to study. I think, like Paxton, that to describe japan as fascist in the 30s-40s is wrong. But that aspect of politics was/is certainly there and influential.

https://i.sli.mg/cCiEOa.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/28/theresa-may-fight-2020-election-plans-take-britain-european/

She thinks that's her big vote winner does she? LOL.

The Prime Minister is understood to be backing plans to “lift and shift” human rights enshrined in the European Convention and write them into UK law.

this was her idea for Brexit as well. to literally take current EU law and emboss it into the very living weft of UK jurisprudence. which isn't quite what people voted for this summer, was it?

i suspect the laws dealing w/ the permeability of borders will be more "shift" than "lift."

i really like the bit in the piece about Orban and Trump linked above where it says something that they both share is that they don't mind being hated - they thrive on it. 'Their two basic postures of “defending” and “triumphing” are impossible to perform without picking enemies.'

Can it finally be time for the Democratic Party to pick a few enemies? People who they don't mind being hated by? It's just so fundamentally lame when you see a 'leader' who tries to please everyone

lol i'm pretty sure there are some deplorables we can unearth

yes except establishment Dems are HORRIFIED to be hated by them, which was sniffed out instantly

seriously tho i think the trump coalition were mostly unified by feeling looked down upon and despised by the wealthier, better educated, woke democratic coalition

if only there were a famous historical figure the dem party could turn to for advice on being hated

obv the real dem coalition is very broad and includes people from various levels of wealth and religious faith but in the culture war it's the universities/media vs. the middle class and their vulgar outsider billionaire benefactor

i disagree

i think there was a hardcore of trump voters who were probably unified by that sort of resentment - there is a racist hard right that feels this way in almost every country, but "coalition" is a very very generous term to use

i think democrats need to pick sides now and go ahead and be hated by that group. you're nobody without good enemies.

this isn't really the thread for it i think (or maybe it is!) but i started noticing how every time ilx would discuss one of these culture wars locations they'd dismiss them as manufactured outrage, exaggerations, misrepresentations, etc, but then i'd see all these right-wing acquaintances post about them as tho they were real. i thought on the merits the right-wing case against transexual bathrooms was incomprehensibly dumb but then i'd see republicans get actually worked up about the topic so obv they were real to someone. it really feels like this election (which i've been trying not to discuss but it's very hard) was kinda more like the 2000 election. the economy is doing not terrible actually, we don't have a particularly pressing foreign entanglement, so there was a luxury to fall back on the culture wars.

like i think this is why evangelicals went so hard for trump. they thought the dem party and hillary in particular was anathema to their values and trump at least paid lip service to their faith. i do think she would've gotten some mileage out of talking about religion more outspokenly but i guess it's not really in her personality. they feel hated by us, i think. and then the nativist / white nationalist group which is probably larger than we think. in the end who did the republicans lose? maybe some neocons in new york like kristol and goldberg.